Alabama

YOUR VIEW: Space offers opportunities and brings progress on Earth

I just read Mark McCarter's fine commentary,"NASA needs more support, more 'national consensus' to reach for the stars."

Many of the observers who were around in December 1972 thought that the final Apollo launch that month was only the beginning of a 10 or 20 year pause in lunar exploration. It was generally thought that a lunar "exploitation" phase would follow Apollo after engineers and scientist were given a decade or so to digest the tremendous booty of lunar samples, scientific experiments, and engineering advances that fell out of the 11 Apollo-Saturn flights prior to the launch of the Apollo-Skylab space station. The moon was considered to be unfinished business that the USA would eventually get back to.

I have had more than one disappointed former moon-walker and Apollo engineer privately share their feelings about this now 40+ year pause in lunar exploration and their consensus opinion is that America is just not the same place that it was in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy pointed America to the High Frontier. Our priorities changed during the years when the civil rights struggle, political assassinations, and the catastrophic US intervention in Southeast Asia occurred. One Apollo engineer went so far as to say that the US is no longer even capable of finishing the job begun by Apollo, even if the public, Congress and the President wanted the country to take on the Moon again. Sure,there were plenty of anti-Apollo critics and cynics around when Apollo began back in 1961, but in 2013 it seems like has never been harder to find Americans who have much confidence in their own government. Political scandals like Watergate, Iran-Contra, and former President Bill Clinton's messy White House tenure each chipped away at public confidence in America. The current Fiscal Cliff worries and the crushing, corruption-driven economic collapse of 2008 have only deepened the state of depression felt by millions of citizens. The dark clouds that always seemed to be on a distant horizon have finally reached us after years of hearing the thunder of the doomsayers who tried to warn us. We seem to be wandering aimlessly in a dark fog of anxiety and low-expectations for better days ahead.

Perhaps we are not the same people we were in 1961. That's good in a lot of ways when you consider some of the terrible things Americans did to their own (segregation, discrimination, jailing gay people, etc.). But it's also a bad thing if we also lost the almost instinctive curiosity and explorer's spirit that brought the original Americans -be they Native-American ancestors, or European, African, or Asian pioneers- to our shores. Those American ancestors were so hungry for opportunity that they risked travelling for weeks or months across dangerous waters and land to reach some place that might or might not be as welcoming as they had hoped.

Space is no different from any previous frontier. It offers fantastic opportunities and fantastic dangers that our human imagination is incapable of predicting. Even better, progress in space simultaneously brings progress back here on Earth in the form of new technology, systems,and processes that neither critics nor advocates can anticipate.